Shattering the illusion of "elite education" and the mystique of the Ivy League, one unemployment story at a time

A Reader Writes

After months of silence, I’ve gotten several e-mails in the past 24 hours. I’m not sure what triggered this, but I figured I would post one of them along with my response.

“Regardless of your misgivings about college, you are still smarter than probably 99% of Americans out there. 92% of employable Americans have jobs. So while the issue of you wasting your time with college may be a subjective issue that I have no right to comment on, let’s just look at the facts. Even in this shitty economy, you can get a job because you are smarter, and thus vastly more employable, than most others.. And that was something that college did for you.”

And my reply:
“Hi there. In response to your comments: my complaint is not that college is a waste of time per se. My problem is that many degrees are impractical, and provide no useful or practical job skills, meaning that it’s quite possible to finish college and wind up unemployed or be forced to find work that has absolutely nothing to do with your degree. This is an especially painful experience if you attend a private school which costs an arm and a leg and is highly competitive. In addition, my academic and professional advisors were basically useless in providing advice on attaining practical skills, or in giving any perspective on what to expect after graduation.

Had I gone to a state school, I could well have ended up in the same boat professionally, but it wouldn’t have cost $200K and the workload would have been easier, meaning I would’ve graduated feeling a lot less stressed and burned out than I was. I also wouldn’t have spent so much time in high school preparing for the experience, which means I could have spent that time instead figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, developing better social skills, dating more actively, etc. Instead, I spent my adolescent years studying… which theoretically could be justified as means to an end, but in this case, the end was crap – bankruptcy, joblessness, living in my mother’s basement.

I have found a job again; in fact, I’m with a decent company now. However, I was forced to go back to school and get a second degree before I found work again (and I owe it all to my local community college). And the degree I pursued was entirely the result of my own research, and not thanks to anyone at Duke. And for what it’s worth, having a college degree is not particularly representative of intelligence, and whatever intelligence I have is certainly NOT the result of going to college.

My chief complaint at this point is that, given what I believe my potential is, I wasted many years of my life accomplishing nothing, while building up a lot of stress and anxiety and missing out on a lot of good experiences that other more “average” people I know have had. I can’t get those years back, but at least I can try to help others from making the same mistakes I did. That was the reason I started this blog.”